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Orbi Blocking Office L2TP VPN After Time - Solved?
I'm hoping this might help someone with the same problem. The Issue: After some period of time (we're talking about weeks or months here), the Orbi stops allowing my home PC to connect to my work...
Thanks for the reply and raising your scepticism. The only thing I can think of is that VPN traffic is arbitrarily being blocked and enabling the service forced the Orbi to open the traffic again. That does seem reasonable for restoring the traffic, but why it's getting blocked in the first place is very odd.
The Orbi is connected to a Frontier cable modem in bridged mode passing the public IP to the Orbi. A lone PC is plugged into the Orbi via ethernet (the wifi is for phones and TV's and such).Each time this has happened I've spent hours on the PC, the Orbi and the office VPN (Ubiquiti USG) trying to find where the blockage was which all signs point to the Orbi router.
When this problem has occurred 3 times now, each time there has been no change to the Orbi, the PC or the office VPN. It just happens out of the blue. I'm very surprised that a factory reset of the Orbi did not resolve the issue. The PC is only really used for remote access so there are no files or anything on it, so I also did a factory reset of the PC to no avail. Logs on the USG at the office show no incoming connection attempt.
In two prior cases, replacing the Orbi with a new one with it's default settings resolved the issue immediately. In this last case, after examining a bunch of things that are common with VPN connection issues, the instant I enabled on the OpenVPN service on the Orbi the PC connected to the work VPN again.
After subsequently disabling the OpenVPN service, the PC's VPN connection to the office is remaining solid again after having been unable to connect all day.
I'm going to do an experiment. I'll leave the OpenVPN off and see if this weird behavior happens again. If it does, I'll only enable the OpenVPN service and see if it lets the traffic through again.
-Ale
Glad that you are "back in business", but sceptical that enabling OpenVPN on the Orbi was actually a solution.
What (exactly) is the Orbi connected to?
Thanks for the reply and raising your scepticism. The only thing I can think of is that VPN traffic is arbitrarily being blocked and enabling the service forced the Orbi to open the traffic again. That does seem reasonable for restoring the traffic, but why it's getting blocked in the first place is very odd.
The Orbi is connected to a Frontier cable modem in bridged mode passing the public IP to the Orbi. A lone PC is plugged into the Orbi via ethernet (the wifi is for phones and TV's and such).
Each time this has happened I've spent hours on the PC, the Orbi and the office VPN (Ubiquiti USG) trying to find where the blockage was which all signs point to the Orbi router.
When this problem has occurred 3 times now, each time there has been no change to the Orbi, the PC or the office VPN. It just happens out of the blue. I'm very surprised that a factory reset of the Orbi did not resolve the issue. The PC is only really used for remote access so there are no files or anything on it, so I also did a factory reset of the PC to no avail. Logs on the USG at the office show no incoming connection attempt.
In two prior cases, replacing the Orbi with a new one with it's default settings resolved the issue immediately. In this last case, after examining a bunch of things that are common with VPN connection issues, the instant I enabled on the OpenVPN service on the Orbi the PC connected to the work VPN again.
After subsequently disabling the OpenVPN service, the PC's VPN connection to the office is remaining solid again after having been unable to connect all day.
I'm going to do an experiment. I'll leave the OpenVPN off and see if this weird behavior happens again. If it does, I'll only enable the OpenVPN service and see if it lets the traffic through again.
-Ale